Bent Notes

People still think there’s a crummy job market even as the economy grew nicely in the second quarter.

Remember this name: Valerie Jarrett.  She’s up to her eyeballs in Chicago-machine hardball politics - and career-helping friendship - with both Obamas.

I wish so much that this campaign - any campaign, for that matter - were about ideas and principles exclusively.  I wish we were talking about the utter failure of socialism and the unwaveringly successful track record of free-market economics.  I wish we were talking - a la John Bolton - about the grave folly of appeasing North Korea, Iran, Hizbollah and Fatah.  I wish we were talking about how the global climate is just fine and the complete silliness of “green” measures.

I suppose, in the age of 24/7 news coverage, celebrity worship and supersized everything, that’s too much to ask.  We have to spend at least a fair amount of time talking about how various people’s speeches, gestures, facial expressions, attire, ways of phrasing postions, are going to either draw in or drive away various demographic groups.  Let’s just remember though, there’s a plain-speaking synonym for “message tweaking”: phoniness.

I really, really, wish, though, I didn’t have to talk about how the modern Democrat party has become a den of liars, fools and thugs.  It sounds so pedantic, crude, histrionic.  Believe me, I’d avoid doing it if its truth weren’t a looming factor in this election season.  If it’s not Nancy Pelosi’s lies about early Catholic doctrine on abortion, or the Obama campaign’s attempt to intimidate WGN’s Milt Rosenberg into shutting down his interview with Stanley Kurtz about the University of Illinois’ collection of Chicago Annenberg Challenge documents, it’s Barack Obama’s asinine vow to stop giving “tax breaks” to companies that “ship American jobs overseas” (here’s a clue, you stupid m—–f—–: the reason those companies took operations out of the country in the first place was to find a more favorable tax climate; excuse my French, but when in Hell is somebody going to call this guy on that?) or the whole party’s continued belief in an “international community.”

It’s supremely important to pay atention to what this mob is saying and doing now.  It’s but a taste of how they’ll rule if we don’t wake up between now and November 4.

Okay, I’m ready to address the Obama-support-for-infanticide matter.

Two issues about which I have come to the expected conclusions for someone of my ideological leanings are immigration and abortion.  I do feel strongly that illegal aliens should not be here, and I feel strongly that if it’s a heinous, diabolical act and a sin against God for me to pop a hole in your skull and suck your brain out, it’s no less so just because you’re not born yet.  That said, I don’t blog or otherwise opine a lot on either of these subjects.  Maybe it’s the well-duh factor, or maybe it’s the fact that neither of them are up in my face on a daily basis (although, with the ever-increasing frequency of “hablamos espanol” signs at used-car lots around my town, immigration is becoming more immediate for me).

This business of what Obama said and did in the Illinois Senate, though, is nothing short of chilling.  Referring to full-term fetal human beings as “it.”  His hypothetical scenario in which “there is movement or something” to indicate maybe said human being isn’t “limp or dead.”

What this does is bring into sharp relief just what all the compassion talk of the Freedom Haters is really all about.  It is the classic totalitarian impulse dressed up as trendiness and post-modern casual populism.  Obama and his party have no interest in actual human dignity.  Their lust for total power is so naked and all-consuming that they are willing to buy the Chinese model for valuing life.  Human beings, according to these monsters, should be accorded just enough sovereignty as individuals to sign on to their program.  Beyond that, they are “the masses,” to be lumped into broad demographic groups and dealt with accordingly.  Those groups that have some use in the state’s plans can look forward to some elbow room and safety.  The less convenient ones had better watch their step.

I realize this is rather sharp rhetoric, but I also know that no US citizen considering a trip to the voting booth on November 4 should do so without first reading the transcript of the Freedom-Haters’ standard-bearer on the floor of the Illinois Senate when the topic of discussion was giving a break to people who squeaked by the abotionist’s death tools.

Just One Minute discusses the reasons why Obama’s ad responding to the ad linking him to Bill Ayres was a bad idea.

I haven’t had much to say about such matters of US politics as VP picks, Hillary delegates, Obama’s poll numbers or anybody’s campaign ads.  While all this stuff is very much on the nation’s front burner right now, I think one can expend an excess of mental energy ooh-ing and ahh-ing over details that, in the end only reinforece the big-picture truths, probablilities, and possibilites that still hang in the balance. 

Here’s what we know: An increasing number of undecided Americans and Democrats are wondering if Obama’s too lefty for sustained viability over the next three months, let alone the next four years and five months.  His pick of Biden does nothing to help him stem the perception that he’s underbaked, gaffe-prone, and an advocate of defeat in the current world war and judicial activism as the tool of choice to curb American freedom.  (Biden honed his chops in all those areas long ago.) We also know that tension on the world stage will ratchet up even further between now and November, which will provide an odor to accompany the perception.

Here’s what we don’t know:  How all the big speeches at the Denver convention this week will turn out, how the H-word Creature’s camp will do at getting on board with the unity thing, who McCain will pick for a running mate, whether McCain will mostly act with consistency and resolve or do something stupid to once again alienate the conservative base, what will happen to the price of gasoline, whether Nancy Pelosi will be forced to make any kind of real sense on domestic oil drilling.

There are still just a few too many essentials in play for us to get all atwitter here at BN. 

Israel releases nearly 200 more Palestinian prisoners, this time of the Fatah variety, and including Said al-Atba, who bombed a market in 1977.  (He would be this release’s equivalent of Samir Kunta, the child-skull-crusher who was part of the July release). 

Condi Rice says this is good because it’s “something that matters a lot to the Palestinians.”

Why are clarity and resolve so easily muddled in this world?  Why, in spite of irrefutable evidence that one is dealing with bad actors, does one yet again expect goodwill and civility out of them?  We’ve seen it in the utter failure to get Iran and North Korea to give up their nuclear programs.  We’ve seen it in the tepid moral equivalency that characterizes the NATO statement about Russia’s war against Georgia.  Is it the high stakes involved?  Or is it some kind of bureaucratic mindset, along the lines of holding a meeting to discuss the household’s options when fire breaks out in the kitchen, a sense that anything can be solved in a conference setting?

This one, though - appeasing the thugs of Fatah and Hamas - is really puzzling, as it all occurs at such close range.  There are no oceans to cross.  In fact, prior to the enhanced security measures of the last few years, Israel got a very up-close-and-personal look at many of these vest-and-belt-attired “partners in the search for peace.”  They were infiltrating Israel proper and blowing up pizza parlors and bus stops with increasing regularity.

A complete recognition of evil entails acting on that recognition.  It means “co-existing” with those who embrace evil in an appropriate way.

It’s often pointed out that suicide is a serious transgression against God. Some argue that it’s on a par with murder.  That’s becasue one’s life is not one’s own.  One is granted stewardship over it by it Author.

Carelessness has suicidal overtones to it.  Certainly, recklessness does.  The interesting thing is that an overabundance of caution - known in its extreme form as cowardice - constitutes a type of recklessness.  In the case of dealing with evil, this is clearly so.  It’s a plain spiritual truth that you can’t interact with those given over to evil the way you can with normal people.  You invite your own demise.  Seen this way, the folly of negotiating with those known to hate you may qualify as sin.

In any event, it’s a dumb thing to do.  To return to my question about how resolve anc clarity get eroded, it may be that what happens is that the principle of habit comes into play.  Something done once becomes easier to do a second time, and then even easier subsequent times.

The real answer to this question would come from observation of more instances of it.  The problem with that is that we can’t afford any more of such data-gathering. 

Then again, maybe all 200 of these prisoners released by Israel today will go home to families, jobs and lives of productive civilization-building, and everything I’ve asserted here will be proven wrong.

Any bets?

He Who Was Formerly Thought To Walk On Water gets off another jewel of a stupid remark, this time praising China’s infrastructure as superior to ours.

I have to run now, but at some point I’ll weigh in on the pro-infanticide situation, too.

He does the moral-equivalency thing re: US and Russia.

These days I’m doing my standing Saturday-night gig on the patio at hotel Indigo solo.  Management wanted to cut the cost of the music program (one of life’s inevitabilities), and, while I miss playing with great associates like keyboardist Daryl Spurlock, bassist Robert Hay-Smith, and multi-instrumentalist Tim Tryon, it’s no skin off my nose financially.  They cut the fee in half, and I take it all home.

What it has done is spur me to re-incorporate vocals into my performing activities.  For many years, that was mainly what I did, and the guitar, if I played it at all, was secondary.  In fact, not having a PA but wanting to keep playing after the last band in which someone else had one was the impetus for honing my guitar chops some years back.  That story is well documented at my main site.  I went to the Aebersold workshop for four years in a row.  I woodshedded hours a day.  I came to see my activites as mainly centered around jazz guitar.

About a week and a half ago, I bought a PA, a Peavey Escort.  It’s a cute little unit.  The speakers, stands, cable, mike and mixer all go back into this compact arrangement resembling a slightly oversized suitcase. 

This is my big chance to define what I do more broadly.  I still have the jazz-guitar gigs, such as tomorrow night at Fork at 532 with violinist Carolyn Dutton, but what I shall play at solo shows becomes a delicious question to ponder.

What I’ve been doing so far (this is my fifth week doing the solo gig; I rented a PA the first three times) is trotting out some chestnuts from some of my favorite blues composers.  I’m doing several songs by Percy Mayfield.  He was one of the Texas people, like T-Bone Walker, Amos Milburn, Big Mama Thornton and Illinois Jacquet, who came to Los Angeles in the middle of the last century to establish themselves in the venues along Central Avenue and record for labels such as Specialty, Modern and Imperial.  For the first two years of his recording career, he was marketed as a dreamboat for black housewives.  He focused more on songwriting after being disfigured in a 1952 car wreck.  Several of his compositions have become staples of the blues repertoire.  Probably his best-known work is “Hit The Road Jack.”  I don’t do that, but I perform “Please Send me Someone To Love,” “What A Fool I Was,” and “Never No More.”  I also do numbers by the great 1930s Indianapolis pianist Leroy Carr, as well as, of course, the Chicago bassist Willie Dixon.

It’s been ages since I wrote a good old song.  I wonder if I didn’t get so immersed in the esoteric fine points of learning jazz guitar - bebop scales, walking bass, chord-melody voice leading, modal explorations - that I lost touch, to some degree, with the overall context in which that stuff developed.

This is something I address in a fictional way in my novel, High C at the Sunset Terrace.  Neither R&B nor modern jazz developed in a vacuum. Quite the contrary: A look at the week-by-week schedule of acts booked into the Sunset Terrace Ballroom, for instance, from the late 1940s through the 50s indicates a rich mix: Charlie Parker, T-Bone Walker, Dinah Washington, Lloyd Price, The Clovers, Dexter Gordon. 

It’s this overall strain of unmistakably American music that I’ve always really been about.

I guess all this thinking in public is just my way of lighting a fire under my tail end.  I’ve been concentrating on craft for years now.  It’s time to do some creating.

In one way, I’d love to see the how-many-homes brouhaha go to its obvious conclusion - The Chicago Marxist’s Tony Rezko problem.  In another way, though, I find this kind of fracas so embarrassing that I’d like to see it die a quick death.

As was my position in my post about who took how much campaign money from oil companies, I think it’s important to shift the terms of the debate.  In that post, I said oil was beautiful, a thing to be celebrated.  Similarly, I think the main point ought to be how wonderful it is to have many homes, how exquisitely blessed we are to live in a society so free that our economy affords us such opportunities.

It’s imperative that when the Freedom Haters trot out an assumption about the shamefulness of something that is, on the contrary, patently wonderful, we instantly and loudly say so.  We must understand that they are trying to set us up to regard these things disparagingly, so it will be easier for them to deprive us of them once they have seized the entire means of production and obliterated every last individual’s imagination, ambition and basic zest for life. 

There are a lot of important aspects to the whole Annenberg Challenge story, and there are several places around the web covering them.  The best one-stop place I’ve found to get a conscise overview, and follow relevant links to one’s satisfaction, is this Thomas Lifson post at The American Thinker.  He can steer you to the latest developments in what Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online and Steve Diamond at the blog Global Labor and Politics are pursuing, among others.

A few observations:

1.) This is a classic case of a bunch of lefties tapping into a money stream, setting up a bureaucracy, holding endless meetings and pushing a lot of paper around rather than actually doing something productive in the world.

2.) To pull this off, you of course need some noble-sounding cause, like “school reform,” to serve as your smokescreen

3.) It’s kind of pathetic to see old Maoist federal-building-bombers like William Ayers reduced to this kind of doo-dah.  It’s a little like aging rockers playing a perfunctory run-through of their hits.

4.) Remember that this is the height of Obama’s administrative experience so far in his life.  Do we really want to give him the world’s top administrative job?

5.) The U of I Chicago library people had better reverse course and let Kurtz see those documents soon, or it’s going start smelling really bad.

Quite by coincidence, today’s blogosphere offerings bring us two items on the same theme.  Mike S. Adams at Townhall tells the tale of the young woman who, only after being referred by a Christian counselor with religious porblems with the young woman’s lesbianism to a counselor who had no such problems and did a fine job according to the young woman, decided to sic the leviathan state on the Christian counselor.  Bookworm gives us an account of a similar situation involving a San Diego fertility clinic.

Bookworm does an admirably effective job of spelling out the distinction between situations in which market choices prevail and those in which monopolyy conditions set the parameters.

And for heaven’s sake, you didn’t croak because you had to drive to another office for your fertility test, okay?

For some reason, as thoughts have been rattling around in my head this morning, a theme has emerged, along the lines of putting on my amateur-anthropologist hat and ponderiing how it is that religion becomes an element of every society.  I know it’s often considered to be an institutionalized way for human beings to inquire into death, its meaning, and what might follow.  Something occurred to me today, though, that I think is worth sharing: It may also be seen as an attempt to get a handle on just what human nature is and how to over come it.

The whole concept of focusing on the now, the present moment, has, like so much else worth looking into, been bastardized and trivialized in our modern culture.  The New Age star du jour, Eckhardt Tolle, wrote a book a few years back called The Power of Now.  The pop-culture interest in the subject actually goes back a few decades, through Ram Dass’s first book in 1970, Be Here Now, and on back to Alan Watts’s Beat Zen, Square Zen.  But the notion of investigating the potential of now has a more serious pedigree; it forms the basis of Buddhism and Taoism.

The general idea is that all creation, all ongoing development of the universe, happens in the present moment.   Who you are, what the blades of grass constituting your lawn are, and for that matter, what the rock at the corner of the flower bed is, can only be defined completely in this infinitesimal pinpoint on the trajectory of all multiplicity.  What you were or what they were five minutes ago is merely the stuff of history.

I kind of think that’s why a lot of modes of spiritual inquiry, from New-Thought Christianity to Eastern thought to even the fluffiest forms of New Age-ism don’t have much to say about sin.  If there’s only this universe full of particles in motion and they are what they are in any given snapshot, where’s the record book of transgressions against any human being for which he or she will be called to account?

Now, if it’s all just a matter of where things stand during this now, and this now, and this now, why can’t the human race choose a now, a particular moment, and, with everybody on board, just collectively drop all its problematic baggage - the stuff like lust, cruelty, brutality,  greed, sloth, dishonesty - the stuff Western religion calls sin - as well as its anxiety and need to defend any number of things and its misplaced sense of what is valuable?  Just drop it all and wipe the slate clean and begin anew?

Is there something about time that causes what we call human nature to kick in and make that impossible? 

I think one reason we as a species could never pull that off is fear.  It’s, to coin a term, human nature to hold in reserve in some little corner of our minds the concern that someone somewhere would not be on board and our dropped guard would spell our demise.

So the parade goes on.  And permit yourself to kick this one around for a moment:  any given snapshot of the parade, any of these nows, depicts a set of conditions brought on by the previous choices of human beings, who as often as not cut moral corners that led to the unplesant, even horrifying, parts of that snapshot.  Now, any human being of any decency who has made such a choice - or, to put it differently, used his or her power of creation to bring about an unpleasant aspect of now - has, on some level, in however a minute degree, regret about having done so.  And since there’s no stopping the space-time continuum to wipe the slate clean, cranking it back up again, and starting fresh in the same old realm, some other form of relief for that regret is necessary if there is any kind of resolution to human existence. 

That brings us down to the question of whether you think there is any resolution to it or not.  If you think there’s not, there’s no point to your decency.

I may have not thought this through with perfect thoroughness, but it looks to me like the only other possibility is a sovereign creator outside space and time, a creator who can grant us forgiveness.  And that, of course, leads us back to the Western model for spirituality. 

That’s about as far as I’ve gotten in this current train of thought, but I feel like I’ve gained ground that was still in front of me before today.

Amity Shlaes has a great Washington Post column today called “Five Ways to Wreck a Recovery.”  Read and ponder her five points.  (I won’t spoil it for you by listing them here.)

What one - well, me, anyway - comes a way with is a renewed sense of how money is a lot like the seeds borne by the fruits of living things.  They find their way to environments in which they will flourish and maximize their multiplying.

Again, this is another way of stating a basic truth that we reiterate whenever we get the opportunity here at BN - greed doesn’t get a place at the table in a properly functioning free market.  Prices for everything fluctuate, but they do so around a set point, which may rise or fall gradually over time.  If you’re charging more than the market will bear for something, you’ll quickly run out of customers.

Look over what she has to say about protectionism and obsession with short-selling.  If you don’t allow people to put their capital where they think it will do the most growing, they’ll take it to some other market.  How does that create jobs in a locale where you want to create them?

And, of course, there’s her point about taxes.  You want to know who’s the embodiment of greed in 2008 America according to the tax criterion?  Look no further than He Who Was Formerly ThoughtTo Walk On Water.

ADDENDUM:  Now, before the exchange of comments heats up, let’s establish one thing: American corporations setting up plants and joint ventures in countries such as China and Vietnam are not, when they do so, engaging in true free-market activity, so it makes a poor example for a counter-argument.

Aged 91.

If ever there were a symbol of the richness and depth of mid-twentieth-century American music, it was Jerry Wexler.  Born to Polish Jewish immigrant parents in Washington Heights, the neighborhood above Harlem at the northern tip of Manhattan.  Nose-to-the-grindstone window-washer father who tried like hell to get Jerry to see the value of taking up the trade.  Mother with high-culture aspirations who made sure he was exposed to art galleries, foreign films and literature.  A youth spent in pool halls and record stores - and sneaking into the Savoy Ballroom to hear the best big bands of the era.  Service in WW II.  A stint as a reporter for Billboard, where he made the rounds of Broadway publishing and song-plugging offices - and where he coined the term “rhythm and blues” in 1949.

But it was his two decades as partner and vice-president at Atlantic where he left his mark.  When you hear “Shake Rattle and Roll” by Big Joe Turner, “Night Time Is The Right Time” by Ray Charles, “Cry To Me” by Solomon Burke, “In the Midnight Hour” by Wilson Pickett, “Respect’ by Aretha Franklin, to just scratch the surface, you’re hearing Jerry Wexler’s contribution to American culture.  (To name a few more, the list also includes Clyde McPhatter, Ben E. King, Booker T. & the MGs, Otis Redding, Duane Allman, Delaney & Bonnie, King Curtis.  And I’ve still just scratched the surface.)

As is noted in this obituary and the many to which it links, he came from that seat-of-the-pants school of entrepreneurship and artistic creation that is so quintessentially American.

I don’t know what kind of greatness could possiby replace the kind he embodied.

Russia threatens Poland with nuclear attack.

What I want to know is, is this stuff some kind of big surprise to our intellegence, security and diplomacy functions?

 She passed at the nursing home where she’d lived for some time.

Never met her, even though she lived her entire life in a town about 25 miles northeast of the city where I live. Within four months of my age. Saw a fair amount of media coverage of her over the years.  Admired her perspective, her crusty sense of humor, her genuine warmth, her enjoyment a bracing libation.  She made friends where she could find them.

What we can learn from the life of the giant from Shelbyville is that real life is just that - real.  It’s not the stuff of chick-mag advice columns or rock album covers or vapid politicians’ droolings about hope and change.  It’s about conditions and parameters and finding your heart and mind anyway and finding a way to refine yur humanness so that people have kind things to say - and a little tear in the eye - when you pas sfrom this realm.

He does something like not show solidarity with his friend Joe Lieberman when Joe is trying to give him some tremendous help.  John McCain - the embodiment of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.

Syria and Lebanon have normalized relations.  I guess that questions about all those assasinated Parliament members and cabint members will go unanswered.  So much for the Cedar Revolution. 

Are the people in Israel in a position to react to the strategic implications of this getting ready to do so?